Jan 2010 28

CRU "climategate" update: the plot thickens10

You may remember that back in November I reported here that we were lodging a complaint with Norfolk Police about clear and criminal breaches of the FoI Act by staff at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. Two months on, the story has got messier and messier.

When I originally called the police, they were a tad confused: "Why are you phoning us if you live in London?"…"Erm, because the crime was committed in Norfolk." "It's not a question of criminal law"…"Ah, yes it is, I've got the Act here."

So they took the complaint on, gave me an official number for it and said they'd get back to me. A couple of weeks ago, I received a letter from DC 461 Stephen Mitchell essentially saying they were referring me to the Information Commissioner. This is obviously a point for debate, because the Commissioner or the Director of Public Prosecutions can take forward FoI cases, but at that time there was still a chance the Commissioner's Office would act on this extremely serious matter. Quite why it took the police six weeks to draft a letter essentially announcing that they were refusing to take on the case, who knows.

This week we got the Information Commissioner's answer - and it is less than encouraging. The CRU did act illegally and in breach of the FoI Act, the Commissioner confirms, but because of the Statute of Limitations on Freedom of Information, it is only possible to prosecute within six months of the offence.

This is an absurdity and a scandal. A six months statute of limitations on Freedom of Information offences has two obvious weaknesses.

First, it is part of the nature of FoI offences, which by definition involve secretive behaviour, that many of them do not come to light for quite some time. There is no benefit to protecting people from prosecution for crimes only a few months old. By what logic is the crime okay if it happened 7 months ago but punishable if it was six months ago?

More importantly, even if you discover the offence or choose to appeal straight away, it takes longer than six months for a case to even reach consideration for prosecution, according to the ICO itself.

Consider the track of an FoI complaint:

  • Before you even start complaining, you will have had to wait 20 working days, hoping in vain for your FoI request to be answered. One Month Gone.
  • Then you have to spend at least another 20 working days appealing internally to the organisation you were trying to FoI. Two Months Gone.
  • Only now, two months after the offence, are you allowed to go to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to lodge an initial complaint.
  • In the next month, the ICO will deal with only 40% of cases brought to it, which tend to be those which are easily dismissed as invalid. Three Months Gone. 
  • Even after your complaint has been with the ICO for six whole months, there is only a 67% chance it will have been dealt with, and those processed at this stage are most commonly punished with a slap on the wrist for the offending organisation. Eight Months Gone.
  • Amazingly in the next six months after that only another 10% of the total cases are resolved. So 14 months after your original FoI, and 12 months after appealing to the Commissioner, 23% of cases are still not processed. 14 Months Gone.

This would be bad enough if the selection of cases to be dealt with straight away was entirely random. In that scenario you would probably have around a 55/45 chance of getting to the prosecution stage within the six month limit. However, it isn't random – and in all likelihood the very fact that your case might require prosecution will mean it takes longer than the available time. If you consider that cases that could lead to conviction are by definition those that require the most attention and take the most time to process, then that rump of 23% of cases still sitting at the ICO 14 months after the original requests are in all likelihood precisely the controversial cases to which the statute of limitations applies.

A statute of limitation is dubious in any circumstances, but when it makes prosecution practically impossible in almost every case it is simply a joke. One encouraging sign is that the Deputy Information Commissioner has expressed a wish to abolish the time limit on prosecution, saying that he is currently "gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law". He should be applauded for that and we would back him to the hilt.

So what can we do now?

Well, there are three things to do. The first is to keep campaigning for proper reform of FoI law to expand its remit and allow more time for prosecutions. One way to do that is to vote for an FoI extension in the Power 2010 ballot here.

The second is to write to the Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia demanding that Prof Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit, be sacked permanently, he is currently on a temporary suspension. After all, while he appears to have escaped prosecution, the ICO has confirmed he appears to have broken the law. The Vice Chancellor is called Prof Edward Acton, and can be emailed here: [email protected] (NB please be polite – we will get better results from Prof Acton being on our side, and the crime was not his.)

The third is to join the TaxPayers' Alliance, to strengthen the campaign against exactly this type of abuse of taxpayers' money. It's free to join, and you can do so here.

Related Posts

  • Taxpayer

    Don’t you think using FOI is using up even more tax payers money? Just a thought…

  • Clippo

    I have supported you (TPA) for a long time but, imo, you’re ‘batting’ for the wrong side on this and other Global Warming issues.
    The vested-interest sponsored Anthropogenic Global Warming deniers have, for years, been requesting data and methods from not only UEA but other world temperature measuring agencies. Simply put, some of this data and methodology has ‘commercial’ value and is distributed around the world from ‘National’ meteorological sources on trust that it won’t be subject to FOI requests from obviously unqualified individuals. These issues have been covered extensively in many reliable science blogs.
    I reacted with dismay also when you sent details of your recent appearance at the Tory party conference at Manchester in which you openly allowed a Competitive Enterprise Institute(CEI)representative to speak about ?carbon trading?. For those readers unaware of the CEI, they are a USA Conservative think tank funded generously by Exxon Mobile and others, and set up deliberately to doubt the grave future problems of man-made global warming to protect their profits.
    I don’t wish this thread to become yet another pointless discussion about Global Warming, – (ALL the real science completely supports it) – but I raise it because it seems to me that the TPA’s mask has dropped and your Libertarian ultra-free market principles are now hanging out for all to see.
    Nobody likes taxation but most ‘ordinary’ taxpayers recognise that to have a fair society, some taxation is necessary. I could say that most of the people running the TPA might not have got any useful education if previous generations had not accepted taxation.
    I suggest you stick to tackling ‘excessive’ taxation and taxation fraud and avoidance issues, rather than becoming the dupes of USA right-wing business interests.
    Secondly, are you calculating the cost of the IRAQ war enquiry? Is the Bloody Sunday enquiry still going – how much did that cost? Should we try to learn by our mistakes?
    Please turn your attention to real public cost issues.
    (NB, I have been a centre right voter for all my long electoral life, so I’m not some socialist activist trying to put you down but it won’t be long before others will question your real motives and you will lose support.)
    I doubt that you will publish this but, if you don’t, I’m going to save a copy and post it elsewhere.

  • Henry Zarb

    @Clippo, who is right or wrong about AGW has nothing to do with this question, which is whether or not the law was broken – there is strong evidence that it was – and why it is that the alleged law breaker is not facing the consequences. You don’t have to be an AGW ‘denier’ to find this disturbing.
    What you are saying is that because you agree with Prof. Jones’s views, you think he should be allowed to break the law with impunity. I think your hypocrisy is showing.
    Interesting that you didn’t post under your real name…

  • k kearney

    Could you not make a fresh FIA request to UEA and the clock will start again. Use a different person to make the request.

  • D. Redfern

    “I don’t wish this thread to become yet another pointless discussion about Global Warming, – (ALL the real science completely supports it)”
    No you wouldn’t want the thread to discuss AGW because you just stick your fingers in your ears and sing to yourself whenever anyone disagrees with your distorted science. That’s not science it’s fascism.

  • Junican

    I read something about this matter elsewhere. According to that place, the law of statutes here applies from when DoI was informed and not the date of the putative offence. As you say, the offence will almost certainly be shrouded in secrecy when it is committed.
    Might be worth try to persue on this basis.
    As regards clippo’s comment, is it possible for tax-payer funded information to be ‘commercially sensitive’ (security matters apart)?

  • gigbod

    @HenryZarb
    Glad you seem to think that all laws are absolutely perfect in this country and should be followed to the letter, even recent ones like FoI.
    Unfortunately, no-one on this site will agree with you about even the simple, long-standing, useful and good law that says “pay your taxes.”

  • Edward Devoy

    If we had “True Democracy in the UK” there would be no need for the freedom of information act, every citizen would have the right to any information held by any public body, without having to jump through hoops. In any society it should be the executive who fear the people and not the other way round, if the people making decisions had to validate them to we the people, there would be no need for the FOI act because they would not dare to act against our interests.
    Time for a bloodless revolution, demand “True Democracy in the UK” http://www.gopetition.com

  • Edward Devoy

    Global warming is one of the biggest ponzi schemes perpetrated ever.
    Don’t get me wrong, I am all for reducing pollution of all kinds but to claim that one gas is creating all the problems in the world and with the worlds weather and temperature is illogicl, and there is no way to measure it any way because the worlds climate changes constantly without input from us, as it has done since the Earth came into existence.
    However what makes the current hysteria regarding CO2 so wrong is the fact that carbon emissions can be traded. Please explain to me how my trading my carbon emissions, allowing someone else to produce twice as much, or more if he buys someone elses carbon emissions, is reducing said emissions. One other thing I dont understand is that carbon emissions are talked about as so many tonnes per year, that to me suggests that the gas is heavier than air, if it is and there is so much of it how come we are not gasping for breath as it replaces the other gases that we breath, and how come stmospheric pressure has not altered, how come we are not being crushed by all the billions of tonnes in the atmosphere? My questions may be daft, but no dafter than the ludicrous claims made in the name of science.

  • http://profile.typepad.com/faykellytuncayblogspotcom Faykellytuncay.blogspot.com

    I have been keeping an update on Facebook on Climategate and supporting the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I have even written a more realistic gov’t. policy ‘Energy, Natural Hazards, Environmental Change and Adaptive Strategies’, which would be a better deal for the taxpayer.
    I have been trying to find more hard numbers on the cost of the IPCC scientific research so far Prof. Bob Carter has stated on a radio interview that “since 1990 the global bill is $50 Billion spent on thousands of scientists searching for the AGW “uncertain signal”. How much of this is from the UK I do not yet know? Could the Taxpayers Alliance help and do a detailed report on this. I would like to offer my help. I suspect it will blow the socks off most citizens and be a far greater scandal than the MP’s expenses.
    I notice that the Climategate enquiry is going to be delayed, should we lobby for the process to be speeded up so that the outcome is fully known before the General Election, because I would like to see the Repeal of the Climate Change Act 2008 as a central issue for the British taxpayer to vote for. P.S I am on Facebook Fay Kelly-Tuncay come and visit me if you have time.